Development has ceased on Plua, and the latest stable version of Plua 2.0 can only be downloaded from a discussion board.[1] The prior version, Plua 1.1, is a port of Lua 4.0. The extensions differ somewhat between versions. The new version is thus sometimes called Plua 2 to avoid confusion.

This text will be saved as a normal memo in the Palm, and executed by tapping the "Run" button in the IDE. Alternatively, the program can be compiled into a PRC (Palm OS Program File, which is executable on any Palm Platform, provided that the runtime program is present) from the same IDE.

A breakdown of the program:

Line #1:

The double dashes define the above line as a comment. All Plua memo files must be defined as such before it can be run or compiled in Plua.

Line #2:

Defines the title at the top of the page.

Line #3:

Prints the message "Hello, world!" onscreen under the title bar.

Line #4:

The above command pauses the execution of the programs and waits for any interaction from the user. These include button taps, character input, or the push of a hard button.

A breakdown of the program: The first line comment is the same as before, but the rest is a little different.

Line #2:

The gui.title function defines the title at the top of the page. Parentheses are optional for a Lua function call with a single string argument (and also for a single table constructor). String literals may be either single-quoted or double-quoted.

Line #3:

Prints the message "Hello, world!" onscreen under the title bar. If the optional parentheses and double quotes had been used (and they could have been), this line would be identical to the first version.

Line #4:

The above command pauses the execution of the programs and waits for any interaction from the user. The argument ioPending is simply a predefined number included in Plua 2 representing a request for this behavior.